Advertising

The Tiny Agency Behind 'Devil Baby' Is Scaring Up Good Business

The conventional wisdom in the ad industry is that you can't create a viral video. You can make a video that you think will catch on big, but there's no way to have a hit every time.

A three-man digital marketing shop called thinkmodo is challenging such thinking. All of the agency's videos on behalf of clients have gone viral and each one gets bigger than the last. Thinkmodo's latest hit, for the movie Devil's Due is a real doozy. The agency put a baby stroller on the streets of New York. When curious onlookers leaned in to look at the baby, they got the shock of their lives:

Released just two days ago at this writing, the video was already up to more than 25 million views. That's already more than six of the top 10 most-viewed YouTube videos of 2013. And it's only the third week of the year.

That's pretty good promotion for a campaign that cost somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million according to James Percelay, co-founder of thinkmodo. Lucky for 20th Century Fox, the studio behind the release, thinkmodo charges a flat fee. "If we were smart, we would have made it performance-based," says Percelay of the compensation scheme. "The upside is that in every case, the ROI is well beyond the cost of production." Percelay estimates that his shop's videos typically produce $10 million to $15 million worth of free media coverage.

Percelay, a former Saturday Night Live writer (he did commercial parodies), formed thinkmodo about three years ago with Co-Founder Michael Krivicka (pictured above at right next to Percelay) and the agency has one other employee, Associate Producer Sam Pezzullo (not pictured). The three represent a new kind of marketing some call "shockvertising" that scares up viral responses with elaborate practical jokes and hidden cameras. While larger agencies try and often fail to make viral videos, thinkmodo is producing hit after hit on a shoestring budget.

Before Devil Baby Attack, thinkmodo's biggest hit was a stunt for the movie Carrie in which a woman in a coffee shop appeared to have telekinetic powers. That video is now up to 53 million views, a figure that would have made it the third most-popular ad on YouTube last year if YouTube considered it an ad.

Other hits have included:

"Bubba's Hovercraft," a vehicle dreamed up by golfer Bubba Watson that has been good for 8 million views so far.

"The Popinator," about a device that shoots popcorn straight into your mouth (2 million views).

"Flying People," a hoax for the 20th Century Fox film Chronicle that shot human-shaped planes in the air and fooled New Yorkers into thinking they saw flying people (8 million views).

As the portfolio illustrates, thinkmodo isn't just a little shop of horrors. That's why Percelay takes issue with the "shockvertising" label. That said, thinkmodo might be guilty of one criticism of the ad business lately — that it will go to almost any length to get consumers to pay attention. This complaint was nicely satirized by Canadian ad agency John St., which imagined marketers scaring the crap out of consumers by abducting them at home and stealing their children to "engage" them. "Good advertising should make you nervous," says a fictional ad exec in the video. "It should scare you."

Percelay says that's not thinkmodo's modus operandi. The agency's videos go viral because they're clever, he says, not because they're mean. "Even when we scared people on the street," he says, referring to the Devil Baby stunt, "they were frightened, but then they were awe-struck. They wanted to see how it worked."

That said, after watching one of thinkmodo's videos, some viewers might be less scared than skeptical. After all, there have been several viral videos over the last year or so that were purported to be real, but were actually staged, notably Pepsi's "Test Drive."

Percelay insists that's not the case with thinkmodo's videos. Instead, he says the agency's practice is to lure onlookers into a situation by inviting them to see something cool. "But we never tell them what it is," he says. "It introduces a little safety valve in the conversation."

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